From The Mind of Merc - Historical Pet Peeves

Sometimes I find my mind wandering over various eclectic topics and occasionally I am inspired to write some of them down. Today I was thinking over the errors that are made in films in the name of dramatic license.

Could I just clarify something? Dramatic license as I understand it means emphasising an emotion or event to make it more dramatic - it does not mean altering history so that it's a better fit with the writer's plot line.

Here are just a few examples of (often repeated) mistakes:

• When an actor with dark or brown hair is cast as Henry VIII. Especially when a redheaded girl is cast as Princess Elizabeth – hint: she didn’t get it from her mother
• When Catherine of Aragon is portrayed as having dark hair - check the portraits, people!
• When someone says Richard III murdered his nephews in the Tower - please give me one good reason why he would.  (And anyone who says they stood in his way please go and look up the Titulus Regius)
• When a precise figure is given for the victims/survivors of Titanic (given the number of stowaways and no-shows it is impossible to create a correct, exact figure)
• When someone says the TV series 'The Tudors' is historically accurate (why this point is wrong would take a whole blog to explain but I will just some it up in one word: Margaret!)
• When someone says Edward VI died aged 16 - he was born in Oct 1537 and died in Jul 1553 - you do the math. Also when they say Edward was a sickly child - he was a perfectly healthy child who contracted Tuberculosis in his teens. (Any ill health as a baby would have been commented on by ambassadors)
• When Mary Queen of Scots is referred to as Bloody Mary (Oh - so that’s not the queen who had almost 300 Protestants burned at the stake) Also when Mary Queen of Scots is portrayed with a Scottish accent - even though she spent the first 18 years of her life in France
• When 1501 is given as Anne Boleyn's birth year (this is a relatively new one but important - for further details see below *)
• When Anne Boleyn is claimed to be the older sister (ok - so this can't be proved but there are several pointers which suggest Mary was older - the most striking being that she was married off first)
• When it is suggested that Shakespeare didn’t write his own plays (even though all his contemporaries said he did). Also when it is suggested that Shakespeare was an unparalleled genius (as in BBC's Dr Who) – he wrote a lot more plays than his rivals – this doesn’t make him a genius, it just makes him prolific
• When Jack the Ripper is blamed for the death of Martha Tabram – different MO, guys
• When Marie Antoinette is credited with saying ‘Let them eat cake’ (when actually it was her mother Marie Therese)
• When people think the film 'Braveheart' is historically accurate - sure – had an affair with a 5-year-old, did he?
• When Thomas Becket is referred to as Thomas á Becket (guess again)
• When Queen Victoria is credited as having said ‘We are not amused’ (no record of her ever doing so) - hence the title of this blog

* Anne Boleyn birth year is mentioned by William Camden as being 1507 (and, before people start suggesting that a 1 was mistaken for a 7, it's written in Roman numerals). Jane Dormer, the Duchess of Feria also remarks in her memoirs that when Anne was executed in 1536 "she was not twenty-nine years of age"